What is Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)?

What is Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) You Often Read or Hear About? Why People Talks About BYOD Policies and Legal Issues? Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is the name for integrating private mobile devices such as laptops, tablets or smartphones in the networks of companies or schools, universities and other (educational) institutions. Usually, the special application to work or study is supplied by the institution.

Organizational guidelines should govern, which staff or students bring their own electronic office equipment including smartphones, notebooks, tablets for service-related or school-related activities, in particular for accessing to network services and the processing and storage of organizational or internal company data.

Basics About Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) brings greater choice to the users and enable the organization to better focus on personal needs. In education, BYOD offers economic and ecological potentials : reduction of the need of having the schools and universities to buy the devices, are BYOD increasingly getting popularity in educational field. Another approach is the concept of Corporate Owned, Personally Enabled (COPE) Device, in which the employees Group’s own the device, usually they are Smartphones or Tablets and they are left to the employe for private usage too.

Risks and Limitations of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) Model

BYOD can be a security risk for the organizations, as organization related data are processed by partially by these other equipments and data move on these devices from the internal network of the organization and which could lead to disruption or security chain or increase the chance of spying. It is feared that with BYOD complexity, the operating costs actually increase. BYOD security relates strongly to the end node problem, where a device is used to access both sensitive and risky networks/services and data.

In addition to security issues of BYOD raises the legal problems. The processed personal data and operating and business secrets must be respected. The liability in the event where BYOD devices harm or damage other equipments or interfere with security, must be clarified to the users. BYOD policies are set hurdles as usage of VPNs , disk encryption or limiting the service offerings. Often in pure virtual desktop infrastructure, terminal server or web applications do not (mostly webmail) permits to store data on the devices.

Under certain circumstances organization must make adjustments to the usage of private devices which is related to the security of the organizational data and the organizational network. In the reverse way, an installed app on the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) by the organization can spy or run certain malware activities on the employee or the student.